Counting my blessings: 2010 was a good year for us (Part 1)

I started writing this at the very end of 2010. However, as you can see it is taking me a very long time to finish, since I am pretty much trying to cram a whole year's worth of posts into this summary. I'll have to write less about the rest of the year or I probably won't finish it before 2011 is over...

We have had a good year this year. We have had a lot to be thankful for and have had fun times this year. Here are some highlights for us to remember and for any readers out there since I pretty much did hardly any blogging this year.

Annie finally grew enough hair to do something with. I

discovered that in January although it took until about September or so to really have substantial pigtails. This year she also has expanded her vocabulary and talks very well. And she is sleeping through the night without waking up and wanting me most of the time now (as of about December. It's been a lot of "a few steps forward and a few steps back," but right now it is the best it has been).

We traded our old Taurus and for a Honda Odyssey which we really like. It took a while for me to be really okay with the fact that little me with only two children now drives a minivan, but I like it enough to be okay with it now.

And because of our update in vehicles, Adam was able to convince me to drive the 24 hours (one-way) with a four-year-old and an almost two-year-old to visit his parents and sister in Texas. We broke it up over parts of three days and it actually turned out to be a lot more fun (dare I call it that?) than I expected. That is the driving. Visiting Adam's family, getting to see their homes and the sites in their area was definitely fun. We got to go to the NASA space center in Houston, walk around the beautiful Houston temple, visit the beach in Galveston, go to some fun parks, dye Easter eggs and have an Easter hunt.

Touching a moon rock

Inside the space shuttle cockpit display

The kids' favorite part of the NASA center: the giant slide complete with elevator to take them to the top

(notice Hyrum's shoes)

At the beach

Annie liked the sand...

and the water when she wasn't too cold.

Hyrum loved the water and being with his cousins

The Houston Temple Grounds

Dying Easter eggs and enjoying the spoils of the Easter hunt

It turned out that we hadn't made it all the way home by Easter morning so the Easter bunny got to make a surprise trip to our hotel room, which is the reason for the beach buckets instead of Easter baskets. Not ideal, but still fun.

In February this year my brother received a call to serve as a missionary in the Rome Italy Mission. This was very exciting news to all of us, especially since my dad served his mission in Italy. Brian said the whole time before that he would be happy with anywhere and there wasn't any place he really wanted to go, but after he opened his call we found out that Italy was the place that he secretly hoped to go. He had been there with my parents just a few months before.

He left for the MTC in July and has been in Italy for a couple of months now and is doing great! I always love reading his emails. I will post some pictures when I get to July.

This year we (mostly Adam) with some help from my family tackled our side yard. We (mostly Adam) removed the dog run gate/fence, pulled and pulled and killed and pulled the weeds (we helped with this part), leveled the ground, built a retaining wall and planted grass seed. I found a before picture, but I haven't found an after one yet... I'll see if I can update that later. It looks a lot better now. This is with dead weeds; sometimes they were green and actually kind of pretty...